Expert search systems help professionals find colleagues with specific expertise. Expert search results can be presented as a list of documents with their associated experts, or as a list of candidate experts with evidence for their expertise based on documents they authored. The type of result may affect search behaviour, and therefore search task performance. Previous work has not considered such effects from the result presentation, focusing instead on how to rank experts or on ways to interact with the search results.

Different brain diseases are associated with distinct patterns of affected brain regions. Neuroscientists aim to understand the variability of these patterns across different brain diseases. We used a user-centered design approach to develop support for neuroscientists in exploring and comparing which regions are affected by which diseases based on neuroscience literature. Our study involved six neuroscientists and nine visualization experts who evaluated the usability and explainability of our visualization tool for comparing disease patterns in brain regions. Our results show that our tool can help neuroscientists explore and visualize relationships between brain regions and diseases, and compare patterns of affected regions in an immersive AR environment.

To support scientists in maintaining an overview of disciplinary concepts and their interrelations, we investigate whether Augmented Reality can serve as a platform to make automated methods more accessible and integrated into current literature exploration practices. Building on insights from text and immersive analytics, we identify information and design requirements. We embody these in DatAR, a system design and implementation focussed on analysis of co-occurrences in neuroscientific text collections. We conducted a scenario-based video survey with a sample of neuroscientists and other domain experts, focusing on participants’ willingness to adopt such an AR system in their regular literature review practices. The AR-tailored epistemic and representational designs of our system were generally perceived as suitable for performing complex analytics. We also discuss several fundamental issues with our chosen 3D visualisations, making steps towards understanding in which ways AR is a suitable medium for high-level conceptual literature exploration.

Modeling user interests helps to improve system support or refine recommendations in Interactive Information Retrieval. The aim of this study is to identify user interests in different parts of an online collection and investigate the related search behavior. To do this, we propose to use the metadata of selected facets and clicked documents as features for clustering sessions identified in user logs. We evaluate the session clusters by measuring their stability over a six-month period.

Classifiers can provide counts of items per class, but systematic classification errors yield biases (e.g., if a class is often misclassified as another, its size may be under-estimated). To handle classification biases, the statistics and epidemiology domains devised methods for estimating unbiased class sizes (or class probabilities) without identifying which individual items are misclassified. These bias correction methods are applicable to machine learning classifiers, but in some cases yield high result variance and increased biases. We present the applicability and drawbacks of existing methods and extend them with three novel methods. Our Sample-to-Sample method provides accurate confidence intervals for the bias correction results. Our Maximum Determinant method predicts which classifier yields the least result variance. Our Ratio-to-TP method details the error decomposition in classifier outputs (i.e., how many items classified as class C_y truly belong to C_x, for all possible classes) and has properties of interest for applying the Maximum Determinant method. Our methods are demonstrated empirically, and we discuss the need for establishing theory and guidelines for choosing the methods and classifier to apply.

Computer vision enables in-situ monitoring of animal populations at a lower cost and with less ecosystem disturbance than with human observers. However, computer vision uncertainty may not be fully understood by end-users, and the uncertainty assessments performed by technology experts may not fully address end-user needs. This knowledge gap can yield misinterpretations of computer vision data, and trust issues impeding the transfer of valuable technologies. We bridge this gap with a user-centered analysis of the uncertainty issues. Key uncertainty factors, and their interactions, are identified from the perspective of a core task in ecology research and beyond: counting individuals from different classes. We highlight factors for which uncertainty assessment methods are currently unavailable. The remaining uncertainty assessment methods are not interoperable. Hence it is currently difficult to assess the combined results of multiple uncertainty factors, and their impact on end-user counting tasks. We propose a framework for assessing the multifactorial uncertainty propagation along the data processing pipeline. It integrates methods from both computer vision and ecology domains, and aims at supporting the statistical analysis of abundance trends for population monitoring. Our typology of uncertainty factors and our assessment methods were drawn from interviews with marine ecology and computer vision experts, and from prior work for a fish monitoring application. Our findings contribute to enabling scientific research based on computer vision.

Comparison search is an information seeking task where a user examines individual items or sets of items for similarities and differences. While this is a known information need among experts and knowledge workers, appropriate tools are not available. In this paper, we discuss comparison search in the cultural heritage domain, a domain characterized by large, rich and heterogeneous data sets, where different organizations deploy different schemata and terminologies to describe their artifacts. This diversity makes meaningful comparison difficult. We developed a thesaurus-based comparison search application called LISA, a tool that allows a user to search, select and compare sets of artifacts. Different visualizations allow users to use different comparison strategies to cope with the underlying heterogeneous data and the complexity of the search tasks. We conducted two user studies. A preliminary study identifies the problems experts face while performing comparison search tasks. A second user study examines the effectiveness of LISA in helping to solve comparison search tasks. The main contribution of this paper is to establish design guidelines for the data and interface of a comparison search application. Moreover, we offer insights into when thesauri and metadata are appropriate for use in such applications.

State of the art web search systems enable aggregation of information from many sources. Users are challenged to assess the reliability of information from different sources. We report on an empirical user study on the effect of displaying credibility ratings of multiple cultural heritage sources (e.g. museum websites, art blogs) on users' search performance and selection. The results of our online interactive study (N=122) show that when explicitly presenting these ratings, people become significantly more confident in their selection of information from aggregated results.

Finding relevant information is one step in the chain of understanding information. Presenting material to a user in a suitable way is a further step. Our research focuses on using semantic annotations of multimedia elements to increase the "presentability" of retrieved information. We investigate the use of domain semantics and discourse semantics for improving information presentation. In particular, we present work showing the use of domain semantics for grouping search results, the combined use of domain and discourse semantics for creating a particular genre of multimedia presentation (biography) and finally show the combination of argumentation structures and domain semantics for generating coherent sequences of video material. We provide comments and insights into the viability of these techniques

We use rhetorical annotations to specify a generation process that can assemble meaningful video sequences with a communicative goal and an argumentative progression. Our annotation schema encodes the verbal information contained in the audio channel, identifying the claims the interviewees make and the argumentation structures they use to make those claims. Based on this schema, we construct a semantic graph which is traversed by rhetoric-based strategies selecting video segments. The selected video segments are edited to form a meaningful video sequence.

This paper discusses generating document structure from annotated media repositories in a domain-independent manner. This approaches the vision of a universal RDF browser. We start by applying the search-and-browse paradigm established for the WWW to RDF presentation. Furthermore, this paper adds to this paradigm the clustering-based derivation of document structure from search returns, providing simple but domain-independent hypermedia generation from RDF stores. While such generated presentations hardly meet the standards of those written by humans, they provide quick access to media repositories when the required document has not yet been written. The resulting system allows a user to specify a topic for which it generates a hypermedia document providing guided navigation through virtually any RDF repository. The impact for content providers is that as soon as one adds new media items and their annotations to a repository, they become immediately available for automatic integration into subsequently requested presentations.

Authoring context sensitive, interactive multimedia presentations is much more complex than authoring either purely audiovisual applications or text. Interactions among media objects need to be described as a set of spatio-temporal relationships that account for synchronous and asynchronous interactions, as well as on-demand linking behavior. This article considers the issues that need to be addressed by an authoring environment. We begin with a partitioning of concerns based on seven classes of authoring problems. We then describe a selection of multimedia authoring environments within four different authoring paradigms: structured, timeline, graph and scripting. We next provide observations and insights into the authoring process and argue that the structured paradigm provides the most useful framework for presentation authoring. We close with an example application of the structured multimedia authoring paradigm in the context of our own structure-based system GRiNS.

With the rapid growth of interest in the Internet as a means for accessing multimedia presentations for education, entertainment, and commerce, comes a corresponding need for systems to supply automatically generated, personalised presentations. Multimedia is a rich and complex genre of resources and the interrelated effects of content, style, and structure ensure that automatic presentation generation is in itself a complicated and challenging task. Integrating a model for user personalisation adds a further layer of complication and ensuring that the requirements of user, supplier, and platform are all met is a demanding undertaking. This project investigates this influence of information about a user in the process of generating a multimedia presentation.

Multimedia presentation generation has to be able to balance the functional aspects of a presentation that address the information needs of the user and its aesthetic form. We demonstrate our approach using automatic colour design for which we integrate relevant aspects of colour theory. We do not provide a definition of the relative importance of form versus function, but seek to explore the roles of subjective elements in the generation process.

Time-based, media-centric Web presentations can be described declaratively in the XML world through the development of languages such as SMIL. It is difficult, however, to fully integrate them in a complete document transformation processing chain. In order to achieve the desired processing of data-driven, time-based, media-centric presentations, the text-flow based formatting vocabularies used by style languages such as XSL, CSS and DSSSL need to be extended. The paper presents a selection of use cases which are used to derive a list of requirements for a multimedia style and transformation formatting vocabulary. The boundaries of applicability of existing text-based formatting models for media-centric transformations are analyzed. The paper then discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a fully-fledged time-based multimedia formatting model. Finally, the discussion is illustrated by describing the key properties of the example multimedia formatting vocabulary currently implemented in the back-end of our Cuypers multimedia transformation engine.

First generation Web-content encodes information in handwritten (HTML) Web pages. Second generation Web content generates HTML pages on demand, e.g. by filling in templates with content retrieved dynamically from a database or transformation of structured documents using style sheets (e.g. XSLT). Third generation Web pages will make use of rich markup (e.g. XML) along with metadata (e.g. RDF) schemes to make the content not only machine readable but also machine processable — a necessary pre-requisite to the Semantic Web. While text-based content on the Web is already rapidly approaching the third generation, multimedia content is still trying to catch up with second generation techniques. Multimedia document processing has a number of fundamentally different requirements from text which make it more difficult to incorporate within the document processing chain. In particular, multimedia transformation uses different document and presentation abstractions, its formatting rules cannot be based on text-flow, it requires feedback from the formatting back-end and is hard to describe in the functional style of current style languages. We state the requirements for second generation processing of multimedia and describe how these have been incorporated in our prototype multimedia document transformation environment, Cuypers. The system overcomes a number of the restrictions of the text-flow based toolsets by integrating a number of conceptually distinct processing steps in a single runtime execution environment. We describe the need for these different processing steps and describe them in turn (semantic structure, communicative device, qualitative constraints, quantitative constraints, finalform presentation), and illustrate our approach by means of an example. We conclude by discussing the models and techniques required for the creation of third generation multimedia content.

This paper presents three user case studies of the multimedia standard SMIL. Each conveys a different kind of typical multimedia. The studies illustrate how SMIL can be used for these forms of multimedia. Analysis of these studies also show potential areas for extension of the language to better suit the needs of Web-based multimedia.

ACM Copyright Notice In order to facilitate adaptability of hypermedia documents a distinction is often made between the underlying conceptual structure of a document and the structure of its presentation. This distinction enables greater variety in how a presentation can be adapted to best convey these underlying concepts in a given situation. What is often confusing for those applying this distinction is that although both levels of structure often share similar components: transformation form the storage of a document to its presentation sometimes occurs directly between these similar components and sometimes does not. These similarities typically fall in the categories of space, time and relationships between document portions. This paper identifies some primary similarities between the structure of hypermedia storage and presentation. It also explores how the transformation from storage to presentation often does not follow these similarities. This discussion is illustrated with the Fiets hypermedia application, which addresses the issues of storage, presentation and transformation using public domain formats and tools. The intention is to

This paper discusses the implementation of adaptability in environments that are based on the standard reference model for intelligent multimedia presentation systems. This adaptability is explored in the context of style sheets, which are represented in such formats as DSSSL. The use of existing public standards and tools for this implementation of style sheet-based adaptability is described. The Berlage environment is presented, which integrates these standards and tools into a complete storage-to-presentation hypermedia environment. The integration of the SRM into the Berlage environment is introduced in this work. This integration illustrates the issues involved in implementing adaptability in the model.

Being able to author a hypermedia document once for presentation under a wide variety of potential circumstances requires that it be stored in a manner that is adaptable to these circumstances.Since the nature of these circumstances is not always known at authoring time, specifying how a document adapts to them must be a process that can be performed separately from its original authoring.These distinctions include the porting of the document to different platforms and formats and the adapting of the document's presentation to suit the needs of the user and of the current state of the presentation environment.In this paper we discuss extensions to our CMIF hypermedia authoring and presentation environment that provide adaptability through this distinction between authoring and presentation specification.This extension includes the use of HyTime for document representation and of DSSSL for presentation specification.We also discuss the Berlage architecture, our extension to HyTime that specifies the encoding of certain hypermedia concepts useful for presentation specification.

We present the user interface to the CMIF authoring environment for constructing and playing multimedia presentations.The CMIF authoring environment supports a rich hypermedia document model allowing structure-based composition of multimedia presentations and the specification of synchronization constraints between constituent media items.An author constructs a multimedia presentation in terms of its structure and additional synchronization constraints, from which the CMIF player derives the precise timing information for the presentation.We discuss the advantages of a structured approach to authoring multimedia, and describe the facilities in the CMIF authoring environment for supporting this approach.The authoring environment presents three main views of a multimedia presentation: the hierarchy view is used for manipulating and viewing a presentation's hierarchical structure; the channel view is used for managing logical resources and specifying and viewing precise timing constraints; and the player for playing the presentation.We present the authoring environment in terms of a short example: constructing a walking tour of Amsterdam.